I. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to methods and systems for managing and/or reporting financial information. More particularly, and without limitation, the invention relates to methods and systems for providing key figures and reports for variable time intervals at run-time using transactional data.
II. Background Information
For many banking and insurance companies, legal requirements (e.g., Federal Reserve regulations in the United States, central or regional bank regulations in Europe, etc.) stipulate that they must provide average balances for various time intervals. In some cases, this is required to establish liquidity. As part of these requirements, they often must generate and store key figures, such as operational balance key figures or average balance key figures. In the case of average balance key figures, they may need to provide average daily balances (ADBs) based on various time intervals, such as week-to-date, month-to-date, quarter-to-date, year-to-date, etc.
Currently, most banks and insurance companies produce these key figures by working from operational data or transactional data. This data may be provided in an On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) system. OLTP is a type of computer processing in which the computer responds immediately to user requests. Each request is considered a transaction. OLTP may create transactional data with direct reference to operational processes and business transactions (e.g., customer requests, invoices, goods receipts, etc.). Automatic teller machines for banks are an example of transaction processing systems.
Most banks and insurance companies post-process the transactional data in an OLTP system to generate and store secondary data that provides average balances. This post-processing requires significant investment in software/hardware modifications, such as ABAP program development on OLTP systems like the R/3 ENTERPRISE system from SAP AG in Walldorf, Germany. These modifications may include creating calendar types and daily ledger-like capabilities in a special-purpose ledger (SL) from a general ledger (GL), which for reasons of performance typically stores transaction data only on a monthly basis. The calendar types and the SL provide the ability to interpret end-of-day balances and to keep track of time (e.g., number of days in a time interval, number of days till end of time interval, etc.). Once these modifications are in place, banks and insurance companies may code ADB algorithms to calculate average balances and generate analysis reports including average balance key figures.
Despite these advances, the current capabilities of such post-processing are limited. For example, it is not easy or even possible in some cases to produce reports with both operational balance key figures and average balance key figures, or reports comparing different average balance key figures because the average balance key figures are stored in a rigid, post-processing average balance ledger. As a result, the post-processing is not able to calculate average balance key figures at variable time intervals.
Alternatively, some banks and insurance companies post-process the transactional data by investing in user exit programs to calculate monthly average balances from two SLs, such as a monthly ending balance ledger and an activity average ledger. User exit programs are SAP-defined program objects where the customer can extend the coding to adapt the SAP Standard functionality in a pre-defined way. The calculation takes place during a rollup process and the results are posted to a monthly average balance ledger (i.e., a rollup ledger). This option does not give the required breadth of desired time intervals for ADBs and has performance throughput problems.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide a way to produce key figures and key figure reports in an efficient and flexible manner with minimum database storage and run-time requirements.